A milestone
This morning, a question on Stack Overflow reached a milestone:
In the five years since Jclancy raised this issue on Stack Overflow, more than a million developers have been stuck in Vim, unable to exit the Vim editor, and the problem has become a meme.
To mark this milestone, we’ve compiled some data to take a look at who’s most likely to get stuck in Vim.
How many people don’t know how to exit the Vim editor?
Last year, How to Exit the Vim Editor accounted for 0.005% of all site traffic, with one out of every 2w users who came to Stack Overflow looking for this problem. This meant that, at its peak, more than 80 people an hour were visiting Stack Overflow looking for answers on how to exit Vim.
Has the ratio changed over time?
Don’t. The question was first asked in August 2012 and received very little traffic at first, but within a few months it topped the search results list and traffic has held steady ever since. This shows that new developers, like their predecessors, don’t know how to exit the Vim editor.
Differences between countries
How many developers in a country visit this question is actually a reflection of how many people in that country are just learning to code. The more people who visit this question, the more people in that country are just learning to code.
According to the data, developers in Ukraine, Turkey, and Indonesia are most often stuck in Vim, while developers in Japan, South Korea, and China are less likely to suffer from this problem.
What language developers are more likely to get stuck in Vim?
We use a question about which TAB users visit most often to determine which language they are a developer in.
The people who seem to be most troubled by Vim are the front-end developers (jQuery/CSS/AngularJS); Developers who use C, C++, Python, and Ruby experience the least of these problems, probably because they tend to use text editors or command-line tools directly, rather than the IDE, so they are more adept at exiting Vim.
Finally want to say
I think it’s interesting that a question like this can be viewed millions of times, and I’m very proud to work and contribute to a website that helps so many developers. You may never know how much you can help so many developers with a single question and answer.
The next time you find the answer to a question via Stack Overflow, remember that it was the thousands of developers who made it possible by asking, answering, and editing.
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